This account is pending registration confirmation. Please click on the link within the confirmation email previously sent you to complete registration.Need a new registration confirmation email? Click here

Telecoms Fight for Global Dominance

NEW YORK (
TheStreet) -- Telephony has always had an international character.

From the time I began covering the field in the early 1980s there was a race to seize international markets with undersea cables and satellites.

As the Internet expanded, both
AT&T(T - Get Report) (then a long-distance company, now part of the former Southwestern Bell) and MCI (now part of
Verizon Communications(VZ - Get Report)) owned the key core Internet Service Providers, or ISPs -- their digital lines defined the international Internet market.

All this has changed radically in the 21st century.

The old landline cash cow was tapped dry. Enterprises from
IBM(IBM - Get Report) to
Google(GOOG), which could fill lines with corporate and branded Internet traffic, picked up unused dark fiber to dominate the international backbones. The cash cows became wireless, serving the thin Internet clients known as smartphones with firehoses of bandwidth.

But since these devices tend to move around, and the best customers are those whose phones move around the most, 2012 has also seen the industry make the first moves toward a grand global consolidation.

Where the last decade was a story of local oligopolies, this decade will be about efforts to build global oligopolies that might take on the Internet core companies, like Google, on an even basis.

It may have been U.S. regulators who set this off.

After AT&T's effort to take over
Deutsche Telekom's(DT)T-Mobile, America's fourth-largest carrier, for $39 billion, was rejected on anti-trust grounds, it became obvious that the only way to scale was geographically.

Thus the Germans turned around and bought America's number-five carrier,
MetroPCS,
as
The Huffington Post reported in early October
, even though the two companies used different technologies.

In retrospect, the T-Mobile move was the Fort Sumter in the new global telecom war.

Masayoshi Son, CEO of
Softbank, who got into the mobile market through his 2007 takeover of
Vodafone Japan, now that country's leading provider,
as
BGR notes,
then launched his audacious $20 billion move to buy most of
Sprint(S), a deal for which
Reuters reports he's borrowing $23 billion.

By adding
Clearwire(CLWR) to the mix -- Sprint owns a majority stake in Clearwire -- Son figures he has enough spectrum to compete head to head with
Verizon Wireless, still 45%-owned by
Vodafone(VOD), and Verizon. Softbank won a similar market competition in Japan.

But more important than the spectrum for Son is the idea that he will have a bigger global footprint, with operations spanning two continents.

Product Features:

To begin commenting right away, you can log in below using your Disqus, Facebook, Twitter, OpenID or Yahoo login credentials. Alternatively, you can post a comment as a "guest" just by entering an email address. Your use of the commenting tool is subject to multiple terms of service/use and privacy policies - see here for more details.